Edna O’Brien’s take on Gerry Adams, 30 years ago

February 1, 1994


Ulster’s Man of the Dark By EDNA O’BRIEN

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Gerry Adams is something of a mystery. His enclave in the Falls Road in West Belfast is row on row of diminutive red-brick houses cleaved together, his flock 100,000 or so Roman Catholics. And his calling in recent months has been a series of talks with an old ideological enemy, the Irish politician John Hume, with the aim of bringing about a “lasting peace” in Northern Ireland.

Today Mr. Adams, president of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, is to attend a conference on Northern Ireland in New York, the Clinton Administration having swallowed its reluctance to grant him a visa. Yet bringing about or even commencing on a lasting peace in Ireland is not an easy task. Behind Mr. Adams must lurk not only the memory but the reality of the last peace process, hammered out by Michael Collins in 1922, whereby the six counties of Northern Ireland were severed from the 26 in the Republic of Ireland, a matter that led to a bloody civil war and caused Collins to say he had signed his own death warrant — as indeed he had, ambushed not long after in his native County Cork in a place tenderly called “the Mouth of the Flowers.”

Whereas Collins was outgoing and swashbuckling, Gerry Adams is thoughtful and reserved, a lithe, handsome man with a native formality that seems to confirm his remark that he has to be two people, a public and a private one. Given a different incarnation in a different century, one could imagine him as one of those monks transcribing the gospels into Gaelic.

While the faithful on the Falls Road swarm to the Sinn Fein office daily for advice and regard Mr. Adams as a saint, he attracts bile and revulsion from many other quarters. When Prime Minister John Major utters his name in the House of Commons, he cannot conceal his loathing, and on television and in newspapers Mr. Adams is depicted as a chilling and inscrutable figure.

The reason is twofold. First, and despite his rigorous denials, it is assumed that he is at the center of all I.R.A. military strategy. Second, friends and enemies alike regard him as a man of unswerving determination. Now in his mid-40’s, he was interned in his early 20’s and remained in jail for nearly five years, writing a column for a Republican newspaper in which he was prescient enough to foresee the necessity of welding the armed and the political struggle. The beatings, the white noise, the torture, the botched attempts at escape (“I am not a great escaper”), the deaths, the coffins he has carried (including recently, and to the wrath of the world, the coffin of an I.R.A. bomber who blew up a chip shop in Shankill Road, killing nine Protestants and himself) — all these have made Gerry Adams the formidable figure he is today. One feels that he has gone into the dark and recognized it as his metier.

It is not that he is discourteous or without wit. He described to me with droll humor a farcelike scenario involving false beards and leather jackets for an escape scheme that was quickly foiled because his lookalike happened to be six inches shorter than he, causing a warder to remark, “One minute I was looking up at Adams and the next minute I was looking down.”

No, he is happy to talk. But like the steel grills that guard his office (a Unionist gunman recently gained entrance under a false pretext and shot three people dead before killing himself), he puts up a kind of psychological grill that gives him the aloofness often found in charismatic leaders. His hero is Nelson Mandela; no doubt, in his journey from violence to the negotiating table, he sees parallels. As for a private life, he says he guards it “jealously.” He has reason to. Not long ago a grenade was thrown into his house — his wife and son were lucky to escape — and when he made a rare appearance 18 months ago in the center of Belfast, at a court hearing, he was shot several times as he walked out to lunch and barely escaped death.

There is something bafflingly calm about him, a studiousness too, as one is admitted to his tiny office, which gives a new complexion to the term spartan. He is putting the finishing touches to a speech he will give that evening, asking again that Mr. Major clarify certain vital matters in the Downing Street declaration of Dec. 15, in which Dublin and London announced that they had arrived at a “framework for peace.” Looking around with a sort of weariness, he asks, “How will it make things different for us?” — “us” being the vast archetypal Republican family for which he feels responsible.

He is all too aware that James Molyneaux, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, has said, “There is nothing in it for Nationalists,” and that the Ulster Defense Association has published a document outlining its own scenario for an ethnic cleansing of Ulster — using some Catholics as pawns and allowing for “nullification” of others to reduce demands on food supplies. The document ends merrily by saying “that the process could be finished within one-two weeks.” To conceive of such a plan is one thing, but to publish it can only mean that the U.D.A. hopes to goad the I.R.A. into greater bursts of violence.

Brave and colorful words were heard after the Downing Street declaration, but as with many a peace process, there have been setbacks. Prime Minister Major says Mr. Adams’s demand for clarifications is merely a cynical act to win further concessions.

But “concessions” is too opaque a term in this context, since any child would understand that the issue is the ultimate fate of Ulster: whether it is to remain in the United Kingdom or not. Mr. Adams, for his part, wants the British Government to start to “persuade” Unionists that assimilation with the Republic of Ireland is the only way forward. It would be a gargantuan task to get any Prime Minister to undertake such a job of persuasion –doubly so for Mr. Major, who depends on the Unionist vote in the House of Commons and who said at the recent Conservative Party Conference, “We are all Conservatives here, we are all Unionists here.”

I believe that Gerry Adams does want to see an end to violence. Asked on a radio program in Dublin last week whether he had moved forward from his 1983 statement that armed struggle was necessary and morally correct, he replied, “Absolutely.” But the path is strewn with obstacles, political and psychological. There is the Protestant hard-liner Ian Paisley saying, “We’re not in the business of getting anyone to talk to Gerry Adams about anything”; other Unionists proposing that Mr. Adams be put in quarantine “to be decontaminated,” and Catholics, North and South, who are tired, weary and ashamed of the 25 years of bloodshed and brutality, all wanting him to settle, settle.

There is, too, the specter of a feud within the Provisional I.R.A., with the former president of Sinn Fein, Ruairi O Bradaigh — who was ousted by Mr. Adams and younger bloods — saying on television that Mr. Adams and his colleague Martin McGuinness were “damaged goods” for having entertained the idea of peace talks with Britain. For Gerry Adams, caught between these manifold realities, there cannot be a sound night’s sleep. Asked what he thinks about when he lies awake at night, he replies, forlornly, “To get back to sleep.”

 

Yet surprisingly, he remains optimistic, calling the peace process “an irreversible thrust.” His task, knife-edged, requires acumen, good fortune, a Job-like stoicism and a miraculous touch for hauling the people out of the morass of mistrust, hatred and paranoia on both sides of the divide.

 

 

5 Responses to Edna O’Brien’s take on Gerry Adams, 30 years ago

  1. Another Jude July 30, 2024 at 6:46 pm #

    A pretty fair assessment I think. Although why anybody had to be reminded that John Hume was an Irish politician I don’t know. Still, not a bad article.

  2. Barry July 30, 2024 at 11:05 pm #

    A sad irony in the title description of him as a “man of the dark”, given his subsequent falling out with Brendan “the dark” Hughes.
    The difficulty of the task As dams commenced is evidenced by its slow progress 30 years later, notwithstanding Nationalists now being a majority in the Six County statelet imposed on that part of Ulster over a century ago.
    Perhaps the recently elected British Labour government may be prepared to walk the process forward, given that they do not have parliamentary seats in the game; in which case it is down to Leinster House to be prepared to do likewise…

  3. Nosuchanaplace July 31, 2024 at 7:38 am #

    Was the”unionist gunman” not a serving member of the RUC?

  4. Donal Kennedy July 31, 2024 at 10:37 am #

    Edna was writing for Americans. A superb aricle.

    The gunman who murdered there peeople and then shot himself, was indeed an RIC
    guarianf the peace.

  5. Patrick Nee August 1, 2024 at 11:59 pm #

    I read this quickly and while Miss O Brein is a noted writer and some what of an Intelect. I would like to point out that while her observation of Adams has substance, she failed to understand the that the gritty aspect of his political opponents and military rivals were deviant. You fight fire with fire and it does not come with honor.